Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Overview of this book

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why settle for anything less? Creating good visualizations to substantiate your ideas is essential in today's corporate environment. Use OmniGraffle's remarkably powerful and flexible features to get your diagrams right. Although fun to use, it can get cumbersome to find out exactly how to get what you want.This book will teach you how to make stunning diagrams without spending much time and energy. No matter if you have never used OmniGraffle, or if you are using it on a daily basis, this book will teach you how to get the most out of this splendid diagramming tool. It will first teach you the basics of the program and then extend your knowledge to a higher level.The book will teach you to make eye-popping visuals using a lot of useful, step-by-step examples. It begins with covering concepts that beef up your basics of using OmniGraffle. The earlier chapters will teach you to prepare dazzling diagrams from scratch with the many stencils, shapes, and fonts that are included in OmniGraffle. As your understanding of OmniGraffle broadens, the book will go even deeper to explain the less understood features of the software. It also covers some handy time-saving techniques such as workspaces and keyboard shortcuts.By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have mastered OmniGraffle to turn your ideas into diagrams.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
OmniGraffle workspaces
Index

Easy shape selection


When diagrams become complex and you want to change the appearance of many of the same objects, you can either hold down the shift key on your keyboard and select the shapes you need to change, or you can use the built-in selection functions in OmniGraffle.

There are three built in methods of selecting shapes:

  1. The Edit | Select | Similar Objects menu command.

  2. The context sensitive menu when right-clicking on selected shapes (Select | Similar Objects).

  3. Using the Canvas: Selection inspector.

If shapes are connected to each other, it's also possible to select connected shapes from the application menu or the context sensitive menu. You will deal with connected shapes later.

What OmniGraffle defines as similar shapes

Similar shapes are shapes that have exactly the same styling, not the form, type or size of the shapes. The styling can be; the filling color or blend of the shape, the stroke thickness, the corner radius, the stroke color, the shadow, if the shape is filled with...